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T The eDGe oF TecH
Dr. rami abielmona is the vice
president of research & engineering at
Larus Technologies corporation
(rami.Abielmona@larus.com).
tacKLinG BiG data
in maritime domain aWareness
Photo: RCN
I
n a world where more than 40 percent of the population
lives within 100 kilometers of a coast and where traditional
and asymmetric threats to physical and cyber infrastructures
and borders continue to rise each year, countries are becoming
increasingly aware of the gaps that exist in their ability to achieve
persistent surveillance and continuous awareness of their maritime
domains.
Persistent surveillance is an essential component in a global
system to ensure Maritime Domain Awareness (MDA). The latter is defined as the situational understanding of activities that
impact maritime security, safety, economy or environment. MDA
involves a system of people, processes and technological tools that
discover, sense, analyse and react to events, and perform physical
and virtual defence of the country's borders. It includes the capture and storage of domain knowledge obtained along with the
actions, effects and outcomes for use in planning future surveillance operations.
The outcome expected from MDA is the effective tasking of
joint and interagency assets to respond to offensive/illegal activities, disasters and rescue scenarios in the maritime domain. In
Canada, MDA requires the surveying of 10 million square kilometers across the Pacific, Atlantic and Arctic oceans, over 200
thousand kilometers of coastline and five million square kilometres of Arctic landmass, and the inherent challenge of monitoring
42 AUGUsT/sePTeMBer 2013
www.vanguardcanada.com
and controlling the vast amount of data and information that will be generated.
This activity falls within the jurisdiction of the Marine Security Operations Centres (MSOCs) and the
Canadian Forces' (CF) Regional Joint Operations
Centres (RJOCs). These organizations are responsible for detecting and assessing Canadian marine security threats and providing support to responders.
Threats include individuals, vessels, cargo and infrastructure involved in any activity that could pose a
risk to the safety, security, environment or economy
of Canada.
Using the many existing loosely connected surveillance and exploitation systems, operators and analysts have been overwhelmed by the tide of incoming data, including sensor outputs, databases, reports
and other sources of information. This situation has
led to operator/analyst fatigue, overload,
stress and inattention which, in
turn, have led to human errors.
We have seen that on a limited
basis, surveillance solutions have
been effective, particularly where
the regions of interest were well
delineated, data sources structured
and precise, events-of-interest few
and far between, and response requirements neither time-critical nor
calculated.
However, this level of performance is not sustainable over time
and on a global scale. Any proposed solution to these challenges
will need to feature continuous
awareness of the environment unconstrained by data parameters or
geographical boundaries, i.e., persistent surveillance.
persistent surveillance
To enable effective continuous
awareness, threat mitigation and re-